Dave Noderer's Blog

Here is a link to a short interview I did with the Microsoft VB team.

Also interesting is all the great links and resources you can get to from the VB team’s blog.

http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/pages/i-m-a-vb-dave-noderer-vb-mvp.aspx

This past weekend (June 18-20) the first South Florida Kickstartz  program was held at DeVry University in Miramar, FL.

On Thursday night something like 20 ideas were presented and discussed with each on getting a paste up sheet on the wall with notes.

On  Friday, a few more ideas were presented and as a group we culled the ideas and combined a few down to four, three of which  were launched into groups for further work.

One of the ideas I had proposed, a home energy monitor was worked on my myself, Lee Culver, Joshua and Alex Mask.

We spent the first couple of hours investigating hardware and concluded that there was no AC control / plug that both controlled the device and also monitored the power.

The other technical area we investigated was control and monitoring software. There are some commercial standards out there like x10 and we ended up looking a bit deeper  into Zwave. Did not go too far down this but I did order the sdk.

Then we drew a simple system diagram  and posted  on a  web  page with the “company” name PowerLinCo.com.

So… we didn’t start a company but did take the idea a few steps further. Perhaps this will turn into a student senior project at Devry.

The other idea that might end up getting launched was my pet project, www.floridasolarpower.com. This was part of the fourth set of ideas that was still up on the wall but not being actively worked. Jace expressed his interest in the core idea of starting a community around renewable energy  much like we have done over the  past nine years with the .net software developer community.

So after some discussion we outlined some ideas and came up with a new name.. RenewableEnergyGuild. I’ve included some of the notes below.

• What is it
  • Develop a community around renewable energy
  • Consumer oriented
  • Monthly meetings?
  • Speakers / presentations / demonstrations
  • Field Trips

• Members - Who is it?
  • Will John Q public show up?
  • Tree huggers
    • Sierra club in Florida?
    • National Wildlife
    • Horticulture??
    • Organic
  • Homeowner associations / condo's
  • Demo green facility
    • Boys and Girls club?

• Sponsors / speakers
  • Vendors
  • Government agencies
    • SF Water management
  • Power companies
    • FPL
  • Home power magazines
  • Solar Today – ASES

 

As for the other groups, Kathy Malone made progress in the area of information pertaining to  hazardous chemicals and Jason Milgram and a large group worked out a number of details around a secure document transfer/tracking service.

Marc Asselin did a fantastic job of organizing this first Kickstartz event and we all learned a lot about various technologies and how to improve the next event.

Thanks to everyone who participated and sponsored the event!!

I’m luck to be surrounded by talented people including  Jonathon King,  former Sun Sentinel reporting, now fiction writer who lives near by and frequents Bru’s  room across the street for lunch. All of his books are based in South Florida so besides the always interesting stories, it’s fun to know the locations and in some cases even the people that are mentioned or referred to.

His latest is a bit of a diversion into a historical novel based mostly in Palm Beach / West Palm beach revolving around Henry Flagler’s railroad and resort in the 1890’s. He is also self-publishing this book with Middle River Press so he can have a lot more control over it’s release and sales.

A signed copy of the book is available for sale on his website at: http://www.jonathonking.com/styx.html. You can also find out a lot more about Jon and his books there.

Long past due is a review of Julie’s book, Programming Entity Framework, ISBN 978-0-596-52028-1

Julie adopted Entity Framework early on, from before it was even available to most MVP’s. This book is a reflection of that involvement with the product and the product teams over the past few years.

This 23 chapter, 750+ page book covers a lot of ground and provides a great reference book for almost everything entity framework related.

The first few chapters introduce the framework and will give you a good working knowledge of how to use it. A few other chapters like using the framework with stored procedures and the entity data source control are a good place to start.

What was amazing to me was the variety of ways that you can (in some cases have to) query the entities with Entity SQL LINQ and method based queries. I’m hoping this is more related to the early stage of the entity framework and eventually the options required to get at various features would focus on a single methodology.

The base of the entire framework is the entity model and is usable in theory with or without a sql server backing store. The “wizard” type of tools currently drive off of SQL Server which is fine with me because I have always started with the data model. The modeling language does allow you to go further and add both relations and entities which don’t / can’t exist in a purely relational model.

Once you leave the vanilla scenario of matching your entity to the database the workload goes way up and there is a lot of detail in the model and storage parts of the framework you will have to be familiar with and manipulate.

The good news is that this book goes through all of the above scenarios and has something about all of the related subject.

Another nice feature is that all the examples are in both vb and c#.

In this light I highly recommend this book for both an introduction to the Entity Framework and also as a reference book you will use over time as you need additional features.

For more information visit Julie’s website: http://www.thedatafarm.com/main.aspx

Marc Asselin has put together a short video about the Kickstartz entrepreneur weekend coming up June 18-20 2009.

Video:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ppl5kQQ8hE

Kickstartz website: tp://www.kickstartz.com/

When I’m home in Deerfield Beach, FL (26.317N, 80.078W) and there is a space shuttle launch watch it from the top of the 5 story garage across the street. Below is the view overall slightly enhanced and then the launch trail heavily enhanced so you can see it clearly. The view is facing north so you can see that the the space center is actually a bit west, ~ 80.6 W due to the slantof Florida to the east. The tall building below the right corner of the enhanced area is the Boca Resort. We live a few blocks south of Boca Raton and 10 miles north of Ft Lauderdale. The tall condos at the right side of the picture are in Boca and are on the ocean.

I was happy to find Small Basic from Microsoft that comes with a programming manual that is simple enough for anyone to follow.

Download and more information here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

As of today the program is in CTP but makes writing windows programs very easy. First “Hello World” program is very simple:

TextWindow.WriteLine("Hello World")

When you start the program a very nice and simple dev environment comes up. Here with a program from the book showing nested looping, turtle graphics (a feature not required) and an event handler.

This is fun to play with with intellisense and help on the right as illustrated below:

Starting to think how I can introduce a bunch of kids to programming with this!

It’s always nice to learn something new…

Today I learned that variables in SQL Server stored procedures have no scope rules.

Take this example:

--
Declare @Outer int
Set @Outer = 1

While 1 = 1
begin
    Declare @Inner int
    Set @Inner = 2
    break
end
Select @Outer, @Inner

As a developer I expected that a new “instance” of @Inner would be created on each iteration of the loop and that the ending select would actually get an error saying that there was no variable @Inner.

But this is not true, all variables have a scope of the batch in which they are declared, code blocks be damned!

Lesson learned… re-initialized each loop of the procedure and everything works as expected.

Embarrassing as I’ve been writing stored procedures for 15 years…

We had the first online version of the Ft Lauderdale developer group meeting tonight.

Eighteen people were online but i was the only one with a web camera… I hope more start getting the video cranked up!

The topic was Introduction to MVC and was suppose to be given by Jim Zimmerman out of Tampa but he called at 5:30 (for the 6:30 meeting) reporting that his laptop power brick was toast and he was out of juice. He had tried to get another one but at this point he was dead in the water because his presentation was on the laptop too….

So he gave David Hayden a call who agreed to do the presentation as they are planning to do some of this for the TampaDev.org group too. That group is focused exclusively on MVC, at least for now.

David did a great job of just going through the basics of an mvc app, no power points, just use visual studio and make a project. We dug into the T4 templates a bit and also validation. There were a number of questions that sparked additional discussion.

I used live meeting to record it all to.

A link to the recorded meeting can be found here: https://www311.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/view?cn=&id=PZ6Z2C&pw= no key is required.

More information, video’s, etc at: http://asp.net

Lots more info at the Tampa Bay Developers MVC group: http://tampadev.org

Visiting son Michael here in Rochester this weekend, he “scored” a couple of VIP Passes to the RIT Imagine Festival (http://www.rit.edu/imagine/) a free event that over 20000 will attend.

We got there early to see the start of the energy race. The idea was to see which vehicle could travel the 3 mile campus course using the least amount of energy. The winning entry used 27.5 watt hours of energy from solar charged batteries.

The entry below did not win but i thought it was an interesting vehicle.

There were two winners one took Dr Destler’s 1800’s banjo (I hope they give it back!) and the other got a $1000 prize.

This was of particular interest because I graduated RIT in 1975 with a degree in Electrical Engineering. The campus has expanded dramatically, perhaps by a factor of 4. Had to get this picture of me in front of the Gleason Engineering building.

The number of projects and innovative things the students are doing is mind boggling. Here are a few of the things i thought were interesting. The great part is that many of them combine multiple disciplines to build real things. This list is a very small set of things, the range of things on display was simply amazing!

• Women in engineering middle school educational sessions teaching kids about fuel cells and electronics
• Investigation into the ways that nanoparticles can enter the body through the lungs.
• Building real hybrid rockets and related telemetry and electronics
• A number of internet developments like http://www.newdigs.com and http://bookmaid.com
• Biomechanics simulating human hand operations. I did not ever see some of this close up before. To simulate a contracting muscle they use what look like fiber covered 1/2” or so balloon tubes. When they pressurize it with air it becomes fatter and contracts longitudinally. When you let the pressure out it relaxes and stretches out.
• The robotic hot dog assembler but that was packed and it was hard to even get a glimpse of it.
• The concrete canoe
• A visit with the off roaders club with a collection of killer jeeps.
• http:tagg.rit.edu is a way to track the most popular exhibits. By texting the exhibit number, votes are automatically tallied and displayed on screens around the festival. And you can go to the website, enter your phone number, and not only see what you have tagged (try my cell: 9542701186) but also see what other exhibits you might want to visit.

Here are a couple more pictures from the day:

Take a close look at the hat, yes we had propeller heads there!

Computer Science Lobby displays:

Now available for VB…

The Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight client applications. It will help you design and build enterprise-level composite WPF client applications—composite applications use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together in the overall application.
This download includes QuickStarts, the Composite Application Library (only provided in C#), and documentation. This download is provided to help the Visual Basic developer use the Composite Application Library. The documentation includes:

• Visual Basic Content for Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight - February 2009.chm: The QuickStarts, Hands-On Labs, and How-to Topics in Visual Basic.
• Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight - February 2009.chm: Complete documentation in C#.
• Composite Application Library Reference February 2009.chm: Library reference API.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=537da1cd-43e1-4799-88e7-a1da9166fb46

I’m here in Orlando at the INETA Community Lounge with Scott Spradlin, Lori McKinney and chatting with Fabio Honigmann, one of the leaders of the Orlando .NET User group. They are having their 4th Code Camp this coming weekend on 3/28/2009. Make sure you register so you will qualify for the drawing, lunch and other benefits! Registration is now over 500!! More information at: http://www.orlandocodecamp.com/

After 34 years (original was in 1975 when I graduated college) of having an American Express card in my wallet AMEX finally pissed me off so much over the past couple of months (I did send a payment to the wrong AMEX account so I’m not blameless but fuck them) that I pulled it from my wallet for the last time and made this small memorial in my office:

A long time / good friend of ours, Arlene Miller in Petaluma, CA is self publishing her first book for both school and home school teachers. You can find it at: http://www.bigwords101.com/. She is now working on a full grammar book.

Arlene is also an English teacher, writing coach and also has a long career in technical writing.

I met my wife Bobbi at a party at Arlene’s house in Boston in 1978.

If you know any English teachers they should have a look!

Last night Rainer Habermann and I led an “iPimp your Architecture”. We had a special treat for the attendees… see end of article.

The first subject of discussion was the name. Alternate names for this type of session were “Trick my Architecture”, “Architect Garage” and “Fix my Architecture”. So.. before the next time we do this we will consider the name again.

First up was Ray Almonte who described a 4.5 million line, mostly c++ client / server cad app that helps design buildings that use his companies roof truss systems. He and his team have considered many things and came to the meeting looking to get a silver bullet.

Due to a lot of “global variables” the current program is almost impossible to parallelize which would dramatically speed up the processing. Currently an engineer will press the button to “design” a building and leave to go get coffee and take a break.

Although it would give his company a competitive advantage, management has not seen fit to spend what Ray has estimated to them to be ~ $500k to do the work.

He has already thought about this a lot and thinks the approach is to one by one encapsulate each of the design objects (walls, panels, trusses, etc) that are currently global variables into objects. This requires wrapping the global and then going through all the 4.5 million lines of codes changing references and method signatures to match.

One new idea from Jeff Barnes out of the discussion was to write a program to automate this renaming / refactoring of the code so that you wrap a global and then run this program on the code base to make the changes. There still may be some hand tweaking but it should be able to automatically change almost everything. Ray thought this was a great idea and will go back and investigate this approach. We are looking for a follow-up report next month!

Here are the notes I took (ok my 3rd grade teacher asked me many years later if I ever learned to write):

Thanks to Ray for transcribing the notes: Email: ralmonte@bellsouth.net

1) 4,500,000 LOC ( Mostly Legacy app after merge of acquired code) 400 customers, 5k seats.

2) Originally Fortran, ported to C, then C++.

3) Lots of Globals

4) Want to process more than 1 object at a time ( Automate a repeatable pattern)

5) Typical Globals

- Piece List

- Plate List

- Different front & back end globals of same information

6) Processes on a Wall Panel

- Pricing

- Drawing

- Cutting info

- Drive MFG Equipment, ...

6) Mostly runs on 2 screens

7) Truss Design

- If not waiting for loads from other components, design

8) Urgent now, low perceived business value

- Encapsulate, abstract up

- Start over

9) Estimate ~ $500,000

10) Maybe some simplification

11) Comes down to business case

Next up was Jose who talked about software he was working on for an insurance agency commission tracking application. A few approaches were suggested including a database centric design and a more object oriented way. I did not take a picture of the notes!

Finally Rainer and I presented the basics of an app we have worked with for many years and which I originally wrote almost 12 years ago. It is a vb6 app for a call center with Nortel Meridian phone switch, multiple call center sites, sql server back end and many modifications over the years. It does not get modified very much these days but is very stable. It does have problems including not running on Vista (app ok but some of the 3rd party components it uses do not), large footprint, and the fact that the telecom world has changed and a new approach is required. Rainer has implemented one part, a new order system in .net that is appended to and takes the place of the built in order features.

Again Jeff Barnes pointed out a two part article in MSDN Magazine Jan/Feb of 2009 that shows a call center app written in Silverlight!! See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd365188.aspx

A diagram of the vb6 system is shown below but for simplicity leaves out many details:

SPECIAL TREAT – Microsoft Surface

If you don’t know what Microsoft Surface is, check out: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/index.html

At the meeting last night it just happened that Myrna Pinto and Phil West were in town with a surface unit to show some government customers. So I started directing meeting attendees into that room so they could get a look first hand. It was the first time I had ever actually put my hands on and tried a surface unit as well.